1st Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts

Call for Papers

A potentially highly transformational technology currently
developing on top of blockchain technologies are smart
contracts, i.e. self-enforcing agreements in the form
of executable programs that are deployed to and run on top
of (specialised) blockchains. A prominent example, also in
terms of capitalisation and market share, is the Ethereum
blockchain. It has a Turing-complete programming model,
and bears one of the most striking performed attacks, the
DAO attack (not to mention the discussed fork adopted as a
counter measure).

These technologies introduce a novel programming framework
and execution environment, which are not satisfactory
understood at the moment. Multidisciplinary and
multifactorial aspects affect correctness, safety,
privacy, authentication, efficiency, sustainability,
resilience and trust in smart contracts. The definition
of new engineering paradigms and further research on
programming languages and verification methodologies, and
security aspects in general, are needed towards laying the
foundations of Trusted Smart Contracts.

A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest and open problems includes:

Existing frameworks adopt different solutions to issues like
the above ones, whose merits are still to be fully evaluated and
compared by means of systematic scientific investigation.

WTSC aims to gather together researchers from both
academia and industry interested in the many facets of
Trusted Smart Contract engineering, and to provide a
multi-disciplinary forum for discussing open problems,
proposed solutions and the vision on future
developments. TSC focuses primarily on smart contracts as
an application layer on top of blockchains. Aspects of the
underlying supporting blockchains may clearly become
relevant in so much as they affect properties of the smart
contracts. Experts from fields like (non-exhaustive
list):

Submission

WTSC solicits submissions of manuscripts that
represent significant and novel research
contributions. Submissions must not substantially
overlap with works that have been published or that are
simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference
with proceedings.

Submissions should follow the Springer Lecture Notes in
Computer Science format and should be no more than 15
pages including references and appendices. Papers may
also be in a short format, no more than 8 pages
including references and appendices.

Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings
published by Springer Lecture Notes in Computer
Science. Authors who seek to submit their works to
journals may opt-out by publishing an extended abstract
only.

All submissions will be reviewed double-blind, and as such, must be
anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, or
obvious references.